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Redux

Nancy Jo Allen

Her face was encircled with feathers
of white hair. Her eyes lacked luster—
cloudy, milky, unseeing. Red
scars marked her arms and legs
below her capris.

She shared my mother’s birthday.
It was an opening for conversation,
friendship, trust.
As months chipped her concrete
wall, sledge-hammering at Berlin’s
divide, she spoke of having received
those scars from the sun
as she hung laundry—piece by piece
on a line to dry in Ukraine.

It seemed unlikely.

Once she revealed how Russians
rounded up relatives, friends,
neighbors . . . then trailed off.
Another time she spoke
of subterranean security
from a bombing raid
in a church basement.

I think of her as I listen
to the assaults on reporters
tossed lightly as a lying press.

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